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Originally Posted by realtalk92
Are you talking about innovation in musical genres or the next groundbreaking musical act?
I say no to both. There is not going to be any innovation any time soon the way the mainstream music industry has been going over the last 15 years.
The music industry of today is a business. It doesnt care about quality music, talent, innovation etc. It just cares about making as much money as possible. Its always been a business but nowadays you dont really need talent or a quality record to be a superstar. The industry is geared toward marketing and promotion and the public doesn't have much input on how successful a song becomes like they once did.
At this point, I am more concerned about the quality of music and talent versus innovation because everything has already been done already. Todays artists are just repeating sounds and music that has already been done (not that that is necessarily a bad thing either).
I like to see the industry give more creative artists a platform to shine instead of the corporate puppets. Thats why it seems the industry is so small because they constantly shove the same boring artists down our ears. If they marketed someone like Jack White and gave him a platform I'm sure he would be more popular. His music might would start a trend for other artists. I liked to see him and Janelle Monae become bigger acts because I think they have it in them to do something original and they just make creative music which industry needs right now.
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The music industry has always been a business, and most of the innovators have been underground artists/not very well known at the time. You could pull out examples like The Beatles and say that they were innovative and extremely popular at the time, but The Beatles got popular because they started out making lowest common denominator pop music. They only started experimenting once they had gained popularity. Most innovators aren't well known when they're creating the best stuff because the majority of casual music listeners don't want to hear something challenging, they want to hear something they can sing along to. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just music made with a different goal in mind.
I mean, the casual music listener didn't know about the Velvet Underground when they were actually making music, but now I'd venture to say that anyone who listens to music much outside of top 40s stuff has heard of them jsut because so many bands list them as an influence. Innovators usually gain notoriety way after the fact because innovators tend to inspire other artists to further develop genres, not casual music listeners. It's usually too far-fetched for a casual music listener.
And as far as getting more creative artists into the mainstream, I don't really see Jack White or Janelle Monae as being unusually creative. I really enjoy their music because both of them do what they do very well, but as far as a breakthrough? Neither of them are really doing anything groundbreaking. And I'd also say that both of them are pretty popular already. Maybe not as popular as One Direction, but I'd say when you can get whole football stadiums to sing the riff to Seven Nation Army you're pretty popular. And Janelle was on SNL not too long ago.
There always have been and always will be corporate puppets in the mainstream, we just don't remember the puppets from a long time ago because they didn't have a huge impact on music. And now that effect may be slightly more pronounced because the internet has allowed innovative independent artists to become popular that way, so we don't have to rely on the radio to give us good music. We can discover and diversify our interests on our own, which I think is 100 times better than having to wait forever for someone decent to gain mainstream recognition.